"Green is the new black"


Vanity Fair falls back on the smear
I know that as a Pagan, I have a "minority view" when it comes to global warming.

Actually, I'm not quite sure how accurate that is. There is a growing tendency among some American Neopagans to avoid controversial subjects in public, so it's harder and harder to get a feel for it.

The standards of what constitutes suppression varies. For many progressives, failure to support the Kyoto Protocol is blackballing global warming. Never mind that much of the Kyoto Protocol was written by Enron executives so the company could trade pollution credits as it had energy credits. Never mind that the treaty was less about pollution control and more about subsidizing the developing nations while penalizing the industrial nations. And never mind that the "science" that the protocol was based on was disputed.

Global warming is a hot topic right now. It's easy to get the beautiful people on your bandwagon. You don't even have to back up your claims.

And that is where the double standard comes in. Because if you criticize the science or the methodology of the global warming argument, you're going to get smeared for your associations, but no one will touch your reasoning.

The article in Vanity Fair is part of a so-called "Green issue" that includes a call to arms from Al Gore and friendly profiles on climate change alarmists such as NASA's Jim Hansen, Ed Begley Jr., Bette Midler, Ed Norton and many others. Since global warming is a "threat graver than terrorism," the magazine tells readers on its cover, it's cool to want to fight global warming. "Green is the new black," Vanity Fair tells us.

In keeping with that spirit, the magazine is trying to blacken permanently the reputation of Seitz, one of America's highly regarded scientists, for not toeing the fashionable line on global warming.

To find out if the startling claim was true -- that Seitz "directed a 45M tobacco industry effort to hide health impacts of smoking" -- I called him at his apartment in Manhattan. Unless there is more to the story, the accusation appears to be a willful distortion, if not an outright lie.

"That's ridiculous, completely wrong," Seitz told me. "The money was all spent on basic science, medical science," he said.

According to Seitz, the CEO of RJ Reynolds -- the tobacco company -- was on the board of Rockefeller University while Seitz was a full-time employee there. "He was not a scientist," Seitz said of the executive, but he believed in supporting the University's dedication to basic research -- in a little over a century, Rockefeller University has had 23 Nobel Prize winners affiliated with it, in fields of medicine and chemistry. RJ Reynolds allocated $5 million a year to Seitz to direct basic research.

To figure out how to distribute the money, Seitz says he assembled some top folks in different fields of scientific research -- such as James Shannon, the director of the National Institutes of Health for 13 years, and Maclyn McCarty, the legendary geneticist -- to help direct the funds.

What kind of research did they support? Seitz mentioned the work of Stanley Prusiner, who won the Nobel prize for his research into prions (Prusiner even thanks Seitz and RJ Reynolds in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech which you can read here).

When I asked Seitz if he ever spent money to try to debunk a link between smoking and ill-health, he said no. When I asked him if he himself had ever denied a link between smoking and cancer, Seitz (who, remember, is almost 100 years old) again said no and told me "my father was a 19th century man, and even he told me from when I was young that there was a connection between smoking and cancer" and that "we often talked about the hazards of smoking." In other words, Seitz was aware of the ill-effects of smoking for a very long time, and has never tried to deny that.

Apparently the writer for Vanity Fair thought it was more important to discredit someone rather than examine the science. This may be a case of the ends justifying the means, but it certainly seems to happen a lot when global warming is involved.

Which doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence in the global warming arguments.

If the science is good, it's going to hold up no matter who does it. More importantly, it will hold up to peer review, one of the major tools in modern research.

I ask nothing more from the global warming advocates. Open the studies, make the data public, and let the debate begin. Far from hiding the truth, this simple process will reveal it.

Just as it has for centuries.

If the case for global warming can't be made using accepted methods, then tell us why and make the case for new methods.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - April 14, 2006 at 04:06 PM  Tag


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